Pedro Garcia-Lario
ESA Herschel and Akari
I am currently a member of the Herschel Project Scientist Team,
working as Herschel Observatory and Calibration Scientist in
charge of cross-calibration issues. I also work for the japanese
Akari mission, taking care of the satellite pointing
reconstruction.
Broadly speaking, my main research interest is stellar evolution.
In particular, the late stages of low- and intermediate-mass stars
while they are evolving from the Asymptotic Giant Branch to the
Planetary Nebula phase.
This is a crucial phase in which dramatic morphological and
chemical changes occur. These changes seem to strongly depend on
the initial mass of the progenitor star and on the metallicity,
which modulate the efficiency of the so-called 3rd dredge-up and
the activation of hot bottom burning.
Most of what we can learn from these stars must be studied in the
infrared, since we are looking at heavily obscured sources
surrounded by thick circumstellar envelopes formed during the
strong mass lossing AGB phase.
This is why I am becoming more and more interested in the study
of the solid state features detected in these stars by ISO,
Spitzer, Akari, and soon also with Herschel, from which a lot of
information can be extracted. The main goal is to be able to
describe how these features evolve during this short-lived phase
and study the implications in the chemical evolution of galaxies.